Carry the Flame (11 page)

When climate chaos and higher temps were added to the volatile mix of a rejiggered environment and drier conditions, the Great Plains agricultural bubble burst.

The reign of wheat, corn, soybeans, and hogs proved predictably brief, from Jessie's perspective as a wildlife biologist. The yardstick of millennia no longer applied when the calculus included humanity's impact on the infinite interlocking of all life.

“I'm thinking we should pass on lighting a torch,” Burned Fingers said to her. “What do you think?”

He wasn't really asking, just reaffirming their co-leadership after taking full command to stop the tank. She appreciated the impulse and nodded. Who knew what was lurking out there?

The Gibbses had guard duty tonight. Jessie handed Keffer her M–16. His wife, Maureen, an accomplished gunner in her own right, would work the second half of the shift. Jessie reminded him to watch for panther packs.

“I'm still worried about the Pixie-bobs.” He brushed light hair out of his face, and she remembered finding the Gibbses and their three children playing possum under the dead bodies of their compatriots the morning after the camp had been attacked.

“We should be leaving the P-bobs behind,” she told him. “They're more mountain animals. The panthers roam a lot farther.”

“I'm so sick of cats,” Keffer said.

“You and me both.”

“You see where little Cassie found herself a Pixie-bob kitten?”

“What?” Jessie blurted.

“Yeah, and she's planning on keeping it.”

Not going to happen.
Jessie marched right over to the truck and found the towhead at the center of a group of girls gathering under the trailer.

“Hand over the cat,” she ordered.

“Mom! It's so cute,” Ananda protested. Teresa and M-girl glared at her.

Pick your battles carefully,
Jessie warned herself. What was she going to do anyway? Wring its little neck in front of them?

Cassie bent over her kitten protectively.

“May I see it?” Jessie asked.

“Sure.” Cassie smiled, lifting it up proudly.

Yes, a soft, furry kitten—and to Jessie's eyes, evil looking. “Where'd you find it?” she asked.

“Wandering around. I think you killed its mama,” Cassie said darkly.

“Before its mama could kill us,” Jessie could not refrain from saying.

“But we can show it a different way to be,” the girl insisted.

“How are the dogs taking it?” Jessie asked the group. Now that she'd seen the kitten, she realized that Hansel and Razzo had been ornery of late. It galled her to find that the hounds had known about the Pixie-bob before she did. But how could they
not
be aware of a mortal enemy, in the most exact sense of the term?

“Not real well,” Ananda said. “I think they want to kill it.”

At least they've got their priorities straight.
“So what are you planning to do with it?” Jessie asked Cassie in as calm a voice as she could manage.

“Protect it,” the child said emphatically. “Just till it gets older. Then it can take care of itself.”

“That's an understatement.”

“And it'll still be nice to us,” Cassie said. “You'll see.”

You're never going to win this one,
Jessie told herself. Everyone adored little Cassie. The girl's mother had been murdered during an attack on their camp down near the Gulf Coast, and her father was gunned down trying to take control of the gasoline tanker at the Army of God. She was everybody's favorite orphan, especially Maul's; the big truck driver's own daughter had been killed, and Cassie was the only child of his closest friend.

“Let's see how it goes,” Jessie said, leaving herself a small opening. “I want everyone to bed down.”

Cassie nodded, eager to snuggle with her kitty. Jessie reminded herself that not too long ago Pixie-bobs were house cats.

Till they got a taste for wild living—and people.

I
n the morning, Jessie found Maureen sleeping on her watch. She nudged her, and Keffer's wife flushed as red as her hair, apologizing profusely before adding quickly, “But there's no excuse. I know that. Did anything happen?”

Jessie shook her head and walked away with her automatic rifle, thinking that Maureen, with more kids than anyone else, might be too worn-out for guard duty; no matter how sharp her aim, she was useless if she was too tired to stay awake.

The caravan started winding down to the desert, brakes screeching murderously on both the tanker truck and van.

“If we can make it down without losing control of this thing,” Maul said, climbing into the cab after a short break, “we should be set for a long way.”

His words spooked Jessie, leaving her to imagine the truck barreling down the hill without brakes, children clinging desperately to the struts and ladders. But by mid-afternoon the worst of her immediate fears hadn't materialized, and she accepted that the truck's mechanics—whoever they were—had done a credible job of keeping the decrepit looking vehicle in reasonable operating condition.

Now they were heading down the last stretch of uninterrupted roadway. Without question, they'd covered more distance than on any other day.

When the slope gentled and Maul braked, Jessie grasped the enormity of the journey ahead. Except for rolling hills, the horizon looked unbroken for a thousand miles, and everywhere she gazed she saw heat shimmers, so many it was as if she had a visual disorder.

Bella and Gilly, the first as light-haired as the second was dark, jumped from the tanker, scrambling to uncover a stub they saw sticking through the dust.

Burned Fingers ordered them to freeze, warning that the stub could be hiding a land mine.

But sometimes a stub is just a stub,
Jessie said to herself after he found that it formed the top of a barbed wire fence post.

And who would want to waste mines out here?

All the girls began to uncover posts. It quickly became a game as they raced farther and farther afield.

Burned Fingers eyed the buried fencing and said, “I guess the oceans aren't the only things rising.”

“This is the same thing that happened in the Dust Bowl.” Jessie stooped to scoop away soil, unearthing the top of a tumbleweed. “These things would roll into a fence, and the more dust they caught, the more they'd block.”

She slapped the sandy soil from her hands and stood. “And then, a century later, it started happening again. Miles of fencing would go under in a few years.” She stared at the emptiness before them, girls running and laughing in her lateral vision, making her smile for a moment.

“They tried planting millions of salt cedar trees to try to block the wind, but they sucked huge amounts of moisture out of the soil.” Bliss, Ananda, and M-girl started listening in, and Jessie found herself becoming more consciously tutorial. “Those trees were non-native, but back when it was still raining some, you could get away with using them. But when the rains just about disappeared, those trees sucked out every last drop, and the soil turned to dust. Then the pigs started getting loose from huge farms, or they were let go because nobody had any food to feed them anymore, and they foraged everywhere, which loosened up the dirt even more.

“That's when it really started blowing. It made the Dust Bowl look like a sneeze, and these fences weren't the only things disappearing.” She glanced at the posts. “Entire towns got buried. It was one mistake compounding another. Stuff like this happened thousands of ways all over the world.” She looked at the desert. “This is what
we
got in the end.”

“Was it like this before they started farming?” M-girl asked. The fifteen year-old's name was Miriam, but her deceased parents always called her M-girl, and so did everybody else. “Originally, I mean.”

Jessie quickly told her about the Great Plains before the settlers arrived.

“Do you think anything's living out there now?” M-girl sounded frightened, and Ananda pulled her close. The blisters on M-girl's hands and feet had healed nicely since her rescue of Ananda and Teresa from an Army of God attempt to burn them as witches.

“I doubt much of anything is living out there,” Jessie said. “But we don't know for sure. The reason I doubt it is the more biomass you have, the more opportunities organisms have to adapt, in a Darwinian sense. Someone said that a long time ago, and looking out there, I don't see much biomass, so I don't see a whole lot of opportunity for life to adapt and survive.”

“Biomass?” Ananda asked. Jessie felt certain it was on M-girl's behalf, because her daughter certainly knew the meaning.

“Everything that's alive out there, or in any place.”

For Jessie, each explanation of a scientific concept was underlaid by the tragic sense that no matter how diligently she tried to pass on her knowledge, she'd never be able to share more than a fraction of what she'd learned in her many years of schooling. It pained her to know that this heartbreaking devolution of education and understanding was probably taking place wherever humans survived.

“It makes
me
doubtful about water,” Burned Fingers said. “We're going to be rationing all the way across this stinking desert. It's hard to believe there's any out there at all.”

Harder still to believe it two hours later when they came upon the first skeletons. A group of five had died, though the only evidence at first was a partially uncovered skull spotted by Zita Gibbs, Keffer and Maureen's flame-haired eleven year-old. The poor girl screamed when she saw it and ran to her mother as soon as the truck stopped.

Nearby, Jessie and Burned Fingers found four other skeletons under a thin layer of crumbly dirt. No sooner had they started rolling again than half a dozen girls spotted a pile of bleached bones and skulls sticking out of the whitest sand Jessie had ever seen. Hannah thought they'd found a small plague pit, but that didn't strike Jessie as likely. The pits were usually huge, well-organized mass graves for those killed by Wicca, or by the hallucinatory violence the virus unleashed in its victims.

Burned Fingers waved her over. “I did a quick count,” he said. “There's at least forty of them.”

She joined him poring over the bones, finding it odd that the skeletons hadn't been eaten. Then she realized dozens of them could have been dragged off already.
More bones than takers.

The children and other adults stood back, perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of recognition that Jessie and Burned Fingers each possessed their own expertise when it came to the dead.

Without a word, she knew they were searching for a cause of death other than the harsh desert conditions. How likely was it that so many would have ventured out so unprepared? And where were their packs and tents—
any
of their possessions? Even a scrap or two.

Burned Fingers found the first evidence of mayhem, handing her a scapula with a round of lead lodged in a concavity. “Someone's been doing a lot of killing out here,” he said softly, pointing to a skull with a bullet hole in the frontal bone.

Jessie nodded. Minutes later she found a small pelvic bone—a child's, most likely—that looked like it had been shattered.

“They were slaughtered,” Burned Fingers said in the same careful voice. His eyes rose to the emptiness that surrounded them, as if he expected it to erupt.

“Look.” She held up a fully intact ankle bone and metatarsal, explaining what they were. “We'd never be seeing this if they'd been hit by a land mine.”

“That's good, but it doesn't mean they're not lying around out there.”

There was little other comfort in the evidence they dug up, and she also took to glancing at the desert every few seconds. Not a trace of anyone, but with soil this light and sandy, a single breeze could obliterate tracks—or bury untold number of dead.

The realization forced her to accept that she could be crouching over scores of bodies, a veritable warren of bones that could extend for miles. Who knew what this century had done to 65 million midwesterners? Everything before her could be a massive unmarked grave. They'd already come upon almost fifty bodies—and ample proof of murder.

Who did this?

Burned Fingers stood slowly, his only obvious sign of age, eyes once more fixed on the all-encompassing emptiness. His hand fell to his sawed-off, a reflex she also knew well by now, though he didn't draw his weapon.

“Hic sunt dracones.”
He didn't translate his words. She didn't need him to. As a scientist, she had a working knowledge of Latin, and he'd uttered a familiar expression: “Here be dragons.”

She rose beside him, noticing most of the caravaners staring into the void of the great desert, as silent and solemn as they'd been at Augustus's camp, and for much the same reason: bearing witness to the murdered—and what it could mean to them.

But why were
these
people killed?
That question needled her.
And why here?

Why
not
here?
she countered herself.
People are killed everywhere.

Her eyes drifted down to the bones, and she saw that the dead might have been heading north.
Like us.

“Who do you think did this?” she asked Burned Fingers. Others drew closer.

“Someone who wanted what they had,” he said simply.

“Or someone who didn't want them getting any closer to wherever they were going,” Maul added. Cassie and her kitten pressed against his side. His hand rested on her shoulder.

“So where do you think they were going?' she asked Maul.

“Why would anyone go back there?” He lifted his hand from Cassie to shade his eyes and squint at the mountains they'd fled. “Especially if word's out about the North.”